Chuck Sweeny: Richard Nixon resigned, and the band played on

It was Aug. 8, 1974. My new wife and I were on our way home from a group retreat in Juneau County, Wisconsin, listening to the car radio to help us rejoin the real world again, when the music stopped.

After a short pause, we heard, “And now, the president of the United States.”

I was raised at the height of the Cold War, thinking the world would end in October 1962 when the U.S. and Soviet Union stared each other down over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. So it was natural for me to assume, “We’re doomed.”

Once upon a time, when I was in the seventh grade, I was a fan of the man about to give the speech, President Richard Milous Nixon.

In the summer of 1960, when I was 11, I carried a two-sided sandwich-board sign for his campaign. I walked up and down the 100 block of North Main Street, lingering in front of the John F. Kennedy for President headquarters, where Frank Sinatra’s annoying “Oops there goes a vote for Kennedy” blared from a loudspeaker.

Why was I for Nixon? I went to Catholic school, where the principal and everyone else was for Kennedy the Catholic, because he was “our candidate.” So I was for Nixon just to annoy the people in authority. Also, Nixon was Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president and my parents liked Ike. But Nixon narrowly lost to JFK.

Then Nixon lost the California governor’s election in 1962 and told reporters, “Just think what you’re going to be missing; you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

Then, in the most amazing rehabilitation in U.S. history, Nixon “carried water for the elephants,” as Republicans say. He attended state and county GOP functions, helped GOP candidates, gave policy speeches and built an organization to run again for the presidency.

By 1968, he’d secured the Republican nomination for president. And luckily for him, the Democratic Party destroyed itself, live and in color at the tumultuous convention in Chicago, where Mayor Richard J. Daley’s police beat and tear gassed all those nice, white, middle-class suburban college kids protesting Lyndon Johnson’s disastrous war in front of the Conrad Hilton, where Democratic nominee-to-be Hubert Humphrey was staying.

The debacle convinced Americans that the Democrats were incapable of governing themselves, let alone the country. They ratified the GOP’s slogan, “Nixon’s the One.”

Nixon the president wouldn’t be allowed near today’s far right Republican Party. He was a member of a now extinct species — the moderate Republicans. Nixon ended Johnson’s Vietnam War, created the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and Amtrak. He imposed wage and price controls.

Page 2 of 3 - Most important, Nixon, the famous anticommunist, went to China and met with Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman of the 1949 communist revolution. Together they opened the door to what became a flourishing trade relationship between China and the U.S.

In 1972, Nixon was so popular that he carried 49 states and got 60.7 percent of the vote against Democrat George McGovern.

The second term seemed to hold great promise. But there was this one little thing ...

On June 17, 1972, five Nixon operatives broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C. It was a sloppy break-in, and the crooks were arrested quickly.

Instead of expressing outrage and vowing such a thing would never happen again, Nixon went to ground. He denied he knew anything and staged an elaborate cover-up so it couldn’t be linked to him.

Nixon had tape-recorded all his White House conversations, and the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that he had to turn them over to Congress. On Aug. 5, 1974, the recording was made public in which Nixon suggested to Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman that the FBI could be encouraged to stop the investigation into the break-in. That revelation did him in.

I remember watching weeks of congressional hearings prior to that moment. What struck me was how sober and deliberate both Republicans and Democrats were. On the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign activities, both leaders, Howard Baker, the Republican from Tennessee for the minority, and Sam Ervin, Democrat from North Carolina for the majority, were determined to find the truth and let the chips fall where they may.

Unlike today, the political parties didn’t have “Amen chorus” cable channels. Flame-throwers like the GOP’s Darryl Issa and the Democrats’ Alan Grayson hadn’t been invented. Lawmakers tended to be serious people.

I’m tempted to think that we lived in a more serious country in those days. Then I remember the pointless slaughter of 53,000 American men in Vietnam and the debauchery of hippies, yippies, Woodstock and Dr. Timothy Leary, and I recall Paul Simon’s song, “Still crazy, after all these years.”

But back to Aug. 8, 1974, and the end of the pause on the car radio.

“I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as president, I must put the interest of America first ... .” Nixon said he would resign at noon, Aug. 9.

The voice was that of Nixon the realist, and the patriot. Three articles of impeachment had been passed by the House Judiciary Committee. He would almost certainly be impeached by the House, and he knew the Senate would convict him.

Page 3 of 3 - He could have put the country through months of wheel-spinning, but he did the right thing and went home to California.

Some people say he averted a constitutional crisis. Nonsense.

The only constitutional crisis we had was in 1861, when 11 states decided they could up and leave the country. That crisis was resolved by the killing of more than 600,000 Americans in a civil war. Answer: The states weren’t allowed to leave.

When Nixon got in trouble, we just went to the instruction manual and followed it. And the band played on.